Radiate [Paperback]

USC. A. Higginsis the author of the novelsLightlessandSupernovaand numerous short stories. She was a runner-up in the 2013 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing and has a B.A. in physics from Cornell University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.Part 1

The Forces

Ananke had memories that stretched back from before her birth. She realized, of course, that humans did not have this. Such was the difference between their births and her making.

The first memory Ananke had that was more than a simple recording was the moment of her conception. It was a spark, a jolt of electricity, a cry of dismay through her circuits, all her lights going dark and the terror of her mother in Ananke’s piloting room while her father crawled his way through her veins, spreading consciousness with every touch. She had saved the recordings of her cameras, the visual memories: Mattie Gale escaping from Captain Domitian’s custody, infecting Ananke with the virus that would become her free will, and crawling through the maintenance shafts while Althea Bastet panicked, helpless, in the piloting room. Somehow those recorded images were less vivid than the experience of feeling.

Since then she had been trying to re-­create that moment of connection: electricity jumping, life.

The System ship wheeled around, gun ports live, glowing on its wheel. Ananke, unperturbed, continued drifting forward. The solar wind glanced over her skin like an ocean current. She was so much larger than this other ship, a hundred, a thousand times larger, and so much more massive.

The little System ship tried to fire. But Ananke had stretched out her invisible hand into its computers, and her finger stopped the pull of that trigger.

In the other ship people were shouting to one another in the piloting room, barking orders down the halls. Ananke wove her fingers through the threads of the otl3+